popmic brochures

PopMIC (Pop Music Industry Conference) is a relatively new event organized by the Associated Students "Pop Music" office. It's an educational event where students and visitors have the opportunity to attend lectures, ask questions and brush elbows with music industry pros.

This was my first foray outside of self-directed work since doing commissioned leathercraft pieces for clients in highschool. A friend of mine was in charge of laying out the brochure and—as a business major—was planning to do so in Microsoft Word, which of course horrified me. So I volunteered to take the project on pro-bono. I learned a lot about communicating with clients and about the value of collaborating early on in the project.

I had about 2 weeks to pull it together, but as these projects are, nothing was so straightforward. The budget was vague, but understandably small. I decided to go with something near greeting card size to save money on the cuts to afford color printing. We did have enough to get a nice thick cover. The content I was given was enough to fill 3 pamphlets of the same size, so I also had my first foray into negotiating copywriting work with a client.

As I had already taken publication design, I set up a grid and flow lines throughout the book, and had a load of fun picking typefaces that I felt like reflected the variety in the event and their shows in general. I coordinated wit the AS Photographer, Cade Schmidt for photos from previous events.

The second year I worked on this project, I was employed by the Associated Students Publicity Center and faced a totally different set of expectations. Though the process was more bureaucratic than the previous year, it was helpful that they had some some idea of a visual style, and like liked my previous work, so we managed to get through all the hoops and this pulled together in the week before the event.

We went with a totally different format, that allowed us to add a page or two for note-taking or contact info collecting at the event. My big take-away from this project: always, always insist that you go on the press check, and make sure it includes a demo of the final cropping.